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To Better Understand Detroit’s Revival, Look At Its Water And Sewerage Department

Oracle

For years, Detroit media outlets would mark their calendars for the day water shutoff notices went out, to have cameras ready for the ensuing spectacle: Lines of people out the door and down the block waiting in the baking sun outside city offices to pay their water bill. “We would have to bring out air-conditioned semitrailers to keep people cool,” says Dan Rainey, CIO of Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD).

Then, in 2016 DWSD separated from a larger regional water district to focus on serving Detroit’s neighborhoods. Rainey saw the break as a rare opportunity for a 185-year-old government agency to change its approach to technology and to tap into local startup energy and expertise to deliver better services. “We’ve recast the organization’s culture from unresponsive bureaucracy to an agency that’s customer-service oriented,” he says.

Rainey and his colleague, IT Manager Paul Fulton, knew a small, local firm, CityInsight, was already at work on a portal designed to help people understand their consumption of water and other utilities: “We asked them if they were willing to take the leap with us and expand to include payment processing and other business processes through a mobile platform,” Rainey says.

With startup energy and a new willingness to try, fail, and improve, DWSD built a versatile customer service portal that’s now processing more than 20,000 online payments a month and is growing by 10% each month. “We’re able to give people options for working with our agency in the way that works best for them,” says Rainey. People can use phone apps and web portals to check usage, pay bills, and make appointments for in-person visits—without waiting in line. And they’ve made the payment systems available on more than 30 neighborhood kiosks that accept cash, for citizens who don’t have a phone, bank account, or credit card.

“We even offer water account updates through Alexa,” says Rainey. “You can ask it what your water consumption is, when your bill is due. If we think you have a leak, we can tell you instead of writing you a letter. We believe this is going to be an important avenue in the near future.”

“But,” he adds, “we want to serve everyone, no matter how tech savvy.” So those same payment applications that work with voice assistants like Alexa also work with a system that lets people enter payment information over a land line. “We want to meet them where they are,” he says.

Detroit has been riding a wave of revitalization energy in recent years, edging back from decades of population loss and economic decline, including most recently a municipal bankruptcy settlement in 2014. Today, 94% of Detroit residents are confident in the city’s economic rebound, finds a recent Kresge Foundation survey.

The DWSD system is just one small piece of a large, complex economic revitalization, of course, but it’s a sign of the opportunity and progress. The new system, running on integrated cloud technology, lends itself to deeper analytics, for example. Now, the agency can “arm our executives with a profile of how a typical Detroiter interacts with us and how a customer complaint is tracked,” Rainey says. “We can focus on what we need, which is how do we help more people to pay on time, how do we get the right assistance program to the right group because they couldn’t pay, how do we find people who are committing fraud, and just everything that entails.”

A Fresh Start 

Integrating the agency’s apps, web sites, kiosks, and other systems is possible due to decisions Rainey and his team made after the break with the larger water district. “When we really looked at our ambitions and our budget, it became obvious that we would need to move many of our operations to the cloud,” he says. The team chose Oracle Cloud, including Oracle Cloud InfrastructureOracle Exadata Database Cloud Service, and Oracle Integration Cloud Services.

The move would not be a simple proposition. First, the agency ported its billing system off of a legacy system in the DWSD data center to Oracle Cloud. The IT team worked with Oracle architects, network engineers, system engineers, and database administrators—“people who helped us bridge the on-prem world to the cloud,” says Fulton, DWSD’s IT manager. “They were here to make that transition possible for us.”

Because, he says, “Rolling out 30-some kiosks throughout the city of Detroit, and rolling out a new web portal, ends up requiring a very complicated back end. Oracle has allowed us to buy into the power of the infrastructure, buy into the power of the Oracle ecosystem” to make it happen, while saving more than $1 million so far in operational costs. “That’s money we won’t have to get from our customers.”

DWSD plans to move five more technology platforms to Oracle Cloud, and “Oracle is sitting in on each and every project to help the project succeed.”

Know Your Constituency

The upgrade to Oracle Cloud technology is even changing who DWSD hires. “We’re no longer looking for somebody who can change a hard drive,” says Fulton. “We’re looking for people who know how to look at data and turn that into information.”

CIO Rainey recalls a recent hire who knows how to look at data and build dashboards: “That way when they work with my collections group, my finance group, my field group, they create value for those teams.”

There is, adds Fulton, plenty of work for people who know the tech. “We have people in our department whose job it is to continually explore what’s next and what’s possible” when DWSD combines its integrated cloud technology with Detroit’s thriving startup culture, he says. Next up are plans to “work with Oracle to use the Autonomous Database platform, especially on the data-warehousing side.”

This technology has, in a very short period of time, helped change how DWSD can help its customers. “If somebody can’t afford to pay their bill, they can get into a payment agreement online” instead of traveling to a service center, says Rainey. “Now we have a name to an account, we have a responsible party, and we can prevent shutoff for somebody. That used to be a 40-minute visit and cost us $30 per to write up. Now we can move that to the web for a 25-cent interaction.”

Which saves everyone time and money, and doesn’t make the local news.